before the emergence of homo sapiens overview on the early-to-middle pleistocene fossil record (with a proposal about homo heidelbergensis at the subspecific level)出现之前的智人概述early-to-middle更新世化石记录(提议关于海德堡人在亚种级别).pdfVIP

SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research International Journal of Evolutionary Biology Volume 2011, Article ID 582678, 11 pages doi:10.4061/2011/582678 Review Article Before the Emergence of Homo sapiens : Overview on the Early-to-Middle Pleistocene Fossil Record (with a Proposal about Homo heidelbergensis at the subspecific level) Giorgio Manzi Dipartimento di Biologia Ambientale, Universita di Roma “La Sapienza”, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy ` Correspondence should be addressed to Giorgio Manzi, giorgio.manzi@uniroma1.it Received 15 September 2010; Revised 5 January 2011; Accepted 24 February 2011 Academic Editor: Darren Curnoe Copyright © 2011 Giorgio Manzi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The origin of H. sapiens has deep roots, which include two crucial nodes: (1) the emergence and diffusion of the last common ancestor of later Homo (in the Early Pleistocene) and (2) the tempo and mode of the appearance of distinct evolutionary lineages (in the Middle Pleistocene). The window between 1,000 and 500 thousand years before present appears of crucial importance, including the generation of a new and more encephalised kind of humanity, referred to by many authors as H. heidelbergensis. This species greatly diversified during the Middle Pleistocene up to the formation of new variants (i.e., incipient species) that, eventually, led to the allopatric speciation of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens. The special case furnished by the calvarium found near Ceprano (Italy), dated to 430–385 ka, offers the opportunity to investigate this matter from an original per